I am a CPA in Texas with an MBA from the University of Chicago. I have seen a lot and made many mistakes. Hopefully by now I will have learned something from them. Just as importantly, you may learn something from my mistakes. You can e-mail me by clicking on my "View my complete profile".

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Future Weapons

"Last August, a resurgent Russia won a swift victory over tiny, democratic Georgia. Sticking with tradition, Moscow relied on mass. The 'new' Russian military couldn't use its precision weapons effectively; its combined arms coordination was poor; pilots flying the latest aircraft couldn't hit their targets with smart bombs; and the Black Sea fleet could only deploy a five-ship squadron. ... Had we wanted to counter Russia's move militarily, we literally 'couldn't get there from here.' A few angry voices called for bombing. But we just couldn't have done it. ... Send in ground trops? Even if we could've deployed them, we couldn't have supported them or provided air cover. We--and the Georgians--were stuck. ... When naive U.S. politicians suggested sending our ground forces into Pakistan's troubled border regions to root out al-Queda and the Taliban, they didn't understand that, were Pakistan provoked by what local politicans would brand as an American invastion, Islamabad could simply deny us use of its lines of communication. That would mean 'game over' in Afghanistan. ... The answer is obvious: We need weapons that don't require permission from third-party governments for their use. That means weapons that can intervene from space", Ralph Peters (RP) at Armchair General, March 2009.

I draw a different lesson than RP, i.e., we should accept a Russian sphere of influence and stay out of it. We learned nothing from Britain's 1939 Polish guarantee, my 24 February 2008 post: http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/02/kosovo-and-polish-colonels.html. As to creating space weapons, I think they would be among the first things destroyed in a war. Suppose it was "game over" in Afghanistan. So? What would we lose? Why should we care if the Taliban control Afghanistan anyway?

3 comments:

Printfaster
said...

Remember the Iridium?

Space accident. No. Those things are charted with extreme precision months in advance. Every piece of space junk has a precisely tracked orbit. Russia was exerting its military authority to anything in its spacespace. The modern equivalnt to FG Powers U2.

Basing war in space is about like trying to bomb London in WWII with a zeppelin. A bit fragile.

Printfaster:I remember Francis Gary Powers ill-fated 1 May 1960 flight. Yes, I remember the supposed space "accident". The future space war is a fantasy of engineers who never had a fist fight. As the US Army War College noted, "Even the best laid plans do not survive first contact with the enemy".

There is a problem that runs through Georgia, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Can or will US allies fight.

Contrary to many news reports when you actually counted forces on the ground on the battlefield, Georgia and Russia were about equal and at the crucial time in the battle Georgia out numbered the Russians. The problem was that the Georgian Army collapsed. This is what allowed Russia to move out of the disputed territory and into Georgia itself. Most of the video we see is from the time after the Georgian Army collapsed and the Russians were occupying territory without facing resistance.

So the question once again is, will US allies in Georgia, Afghanistan and Pakistan fight on the US side, if not then its not much use being there and certainly these counties should not be US allies.

The same can be said for some other US “allies” around the world as well.